I have an opening for a master M2 internship project at the IPhT, CEA-Saclay for the Winter/Spring 2016. See below for more information. If you are interested please contact me directly at marco.schiro@cea.fr

Recent years have seen an enormous increase in the level of control over light-matter interactions at the genuine quantum level with both atomic and solid-state systems. These major experimental achievements have brought forth a novel class of systems where light and matter play equally important roles in emergent quantum many body phenomena. A crucial feature of this kind of systems is their intrinsic non equilibrium nature: indeed unavoidable photon losses, together with the possibility of feeding in additional photons through continuous external driving, make them open quantum many body systems. Under the influence of driving and dissipation they can display interesting steady states undergoing quantum phase transitions with new universal properties.

The goal of this internship project is to study the effect of photon dissipation on a prototype example of light-matter phase transition, the Dicke super-radiance. To this extent we will compute several observables and characterize the phase diagram as a function of light-matter coupling and dissipation. The stage will be theoretical, at the rich interface between non equilibrium statistical physics, quantum condensed matter and quantum optics, and will make use of analytical techniques (large spin approach, Keldysh Field Theory) and/or simple numerical calculations.